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Experiments in Corporate Intelligence: SunMeme

Sun Microsystems is if not unique then at least rare in the robustness of its internal blogging community, and the willingness of the corporate legal department to make that community public. Indeed, Sun has almost 5000 publicly readable blogs - from the CEO to the developers in the trenches, from all around the world.

I think its great - I’ve been a long term advocate of internal blogging and the knowledge sharing and growth spurs. There’s more though: a corporate blog community as robust as Sun’s presents a great opportunity for aggregation and memetic analysis: so, I copied and pasted TechWatching onto SunMeme.com and pointed the system to Sun’s blogosphere and let it off its leash.

So far its tracking 683 Sun blogs, of which its actively processing stories from the 182 most active. From what I can tell, it starting to produce some good output - story clusters building around the new UltraSparc processor, for instance, or a NetBeans talk that took place in SecondLife.

There are challenges in tackling the Sun blogosphere too, however; keyword analysis is difficult as some keywords (”java”) are omnipresent, and can’t be used to link together stories. I’m convinced that there’s workarounds though, and the deeper SunMeme gets into the Sun blogosphere, the better the output is looking.

Anyway, enjoy. And if you work at Sun, please feel free to share your thoughts!

memetrackers, sun sunmeme

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Apple & ZFS: Investigating SAN’s & Home Media Servers?

The big inference that people seem to be missing this morning comes from this quote:

“ZFS is not the default file system for Leopard. We are exploring it as a file system option for high-end storage systems with really large storage. As a result, we have included ZFS — a read-only copy of ZFS — in Leopard.” [from: InfoWeek]

So - Apple, the king of digital media, is experimenting with a new and exciting file system designed for large storage solutions. What could they be up to? How about a consumer home-media SAN that also can be talked to over the Internet? Something synchronizes/shares/connects your desktop, laptop, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod and acts as a DVR, backup solution, and streaming media server.

It could be software running on any desktop Leopard machine. Or, it could be a hardware solution. Anyway - that’s my guess: ZFS is positioning Apple to release a stopgap SAN-for-homes that can handle media until broadband is truly ubiquitous and all of your media can be stored in the cloud.

apple, leopard, san, sun zfs

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Apple, Sun, Vista, and ZFS

A few days back, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz made an announcement about Sun’s next-gen file system (ZFS) being one of the key features of Apple OSX Leopard. Today, Apple rejected that sound bite, claiming HFS+ (from 1998) is still the order of the day.

First point: this reminds me a lot of Windows Vista and the whole WinFS debacle. Its amazing how much trouble filesystems seem to give OS manufacturers.

Second point: How does one have so severe a disconnect between major companies that embarrassing PR situations like this take place?

I’m not much of a geek, but one thing that does get me excited is file systems. Speed, searchability, security, reliability - all of these are tied to your FS, and ZFS seems to offer great advantages for each. So - I wish Apple or MS would get to it already.

apple, filesystem, hfs, microsoft, os, sun, techmeme, winfs zfs

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The Semantic World - properties and methods for the r.w.

There’s a number of trends in technology that have the potential to come together and enable some truly radical changes in our day to day lives. I’d throw out RFID, location-aware devices, and pervasive wifi as primary examples. What I’ve really been hunting for, however, its a way to bring it all together - essentially a small, location-aware RFID-to-WiFi gateway.

Consider the following scenario:

You walk into a meeting room. Your IM presence flips to “busy,” your cellphone switches to silent and direct-to-voicemail, and friends/family/co-workers with access to your schedule can see that you made it to the meeting and how long you’ll be there. When you leave the meeting room, everything flips back, except IM status which flips to “on the road.” You get into a cab, get back to your office, and get out of the cab - payment is automatic. You finally make it back to your desk, at which point IM status changes to available, your phone calls route to your desk phone, and your PC logs itself back in.

Essentially, your identity is projected in a cloud around you (”extended identity”), and it can affect “things” around you, and be affected in turn - i.e.: the act of entering or leaving an area affects you; the act of leaving a cab with which you have a payment agreement affects the cab (it gets paid).

How this is enabled is by applying a software methodology to the larger world - creating a semantic world where a meeting room knows that its a meeting room, a taxicab knows that its a cab and can ask for payment, and your extended identity knows how (generally) to handle interactions that it encounters on your behalf. Each of these “realworld objects” has properties and methods associated with it to enable transactions. There two bits to this:

1. Semantic Infrastructure: For the meeting room above, I’d see the doorway as the semantic infrastructure bit - the frame would have either embedded RFID or Bluetooth infrastrucutre to communicate with the extended identities that pass through it.
2. Extended Identity Profile: A means of projecting and managing your extended identity; your profile would reside online, projected and accessed locally via a smartcard, or cellphone (Bluetooth again).

Anyway - bits and peices of this exist already - cars that don’t need keys, office-access smartcards, etc. But they’re far from pervasive, and built on a frustratingly fragmented infrastructure that doesn’t connect anything to anything else. Getting the technology more widely deployed will require a cheap, open, easily programmable, extensible, and connected device - something akin to the Sun SPOT. Stitching it all together into a useable, single-point-of-access “real world user profile” will require some serious software infrastructure; the company that positions itself to provide that will be 10 steps ahead of the curve.

</end nerdgasm>

bluetooth, gps, rfid, semantic, semantic web sun

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